The present invention generally relates to the field of communications services and, more particularly, to contact databases for communications services.
A wide variety of means exist for communication between users. For example, a user may be contacted via a home phone, work phone, mobile phone etc. In addition, users may also communicate using devices such as PC's, PDA's, pagers, etc. using, for example, email and instant messaging.
With the proliferation of different types of communications, managing communications contacts has generally become more complex and burdensome. For example, a person may have a work phone number, a home telephone number, a cellular telephone number, a work e-mail address, a home e-mail address, and other contact identifiers. Therefore, managing such a variety of information in, for example, an address book, may be difficult and prone to error.
Techniques have been developed for sharing contact information among multiple users. For example, applications have been developed to allow sharing of contact folders among Outlook® users. However, such an approach may not actually merge contact information. Such systems also may not resolve conflicts between information in folders.
Critical Path, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif., has announced development of an extensible Universal Address Book that allows telecommunications carriers to provide end-to-end synchronization and contact sharing among subscribers. The system stores subscribers' address books on the carrier's network and synchronizes that data across all of their messaging services and devices. The system lets subscribers enable automatic updates of entries in their address book whenever contacts change their information. These updates are sent to the subscribers' devices and applications. Subscribers can automatically be connected to other subscribers' dynamic content information whenever a new email address is entered into an address book. The Critical Path Universal Address Book is described at http://www.criticalpath.net.